Cloning could be used to save species—or make human “organ sacks”

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.

That’s right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome. Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi who co-led the work, told me it felt a bit like sci-fi.

Ishiuchi and his colleague Shogo Matoba of the Riken BioResource Research Center hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from the cool to the outright creepy.

We can’t talk about cloning without mentioning Dolly, the celebrity sheep born in 1996 and the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell. In that case, scientists took the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult mammary cell from one sheep and transferred it into an egg cell that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting embryo was transferred to a surrogate sheep, which gave birth to Dolly—an animal genetically identical to the DNA donor.

The scientists behind that work were interested in genetically modifying livestock. Farmers have essentially been doing this for thousands of years through selective breeding, but cloning allows scientists to create genetic replicas of animals with desirable traits.

Cloning is also being used to replicate deceased pets, including, famously, those of Barbra Streisand and Tom Brady, among others. For a price somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, a company can take cells from your pet and turn them into a living, breathing clone.

Considering that cloning also requires egg cells from another animal, and a surrogate animal to carry the pregnancy, not everyone is on board with this, especially since there is no medical or environmental need for the procedures. One bioethicist, Jessica Pierce, has described this aspect of dog cloning as “the exploitation of the canine underclass.”

The case for cloning is stronger when it comes to conservation—where some argue there is environmental value.

Scientists have been preserving animal tissues for years. Some of these tissues are cryopreserved at low temperatures in “frozen zoos.” The facility at the San Diego Zoo, for example, currently has cells from over 1,300 species. Some of these samples were taken decades ago.

Preserved tissues like these have enabled scientists to create clones of animals considered close to extinction, including black-footed ferrets and Przewalski’s horse. But they might also help us bring back extinct animals.

In 2009, researchers in Spain described how they’d cloned an extinct wild goat, the Pyrenean ibex, using skin cells that had been cryopreserved a decade earlier. In that research, the team used egg cells from domestic goats to create a total of 439 embryos. Ultimately, only one goat—a female—was born. She died minutes later because of a defect in her lungs.

Poor Pyrenean ibex. It’s the only animal we know of that has gone extinct twice.

The biotech company Colossal Biosciences is hoping to use old—and potentially ancient—genetic material to bring back long-extinct species like the thylacine and woolly mammoth. So far, the company’s efforts have largely involved modifying the genomes of modern-day animals.

Technically, it’s also possible to clone humans. As far as we know, no one has done it. But some have played with the idea. One biotech startup founder has pitched an idea for “brainless clones”—human clones that lack a brain but contain all the organs people might need to replace their own in future. My colleague Antonio Regalado described that pitch in March. (I had to pause eating my lunch while rereading it.)

Scientists have done a hell of a lot with cloning over the last few decades. I’m excited—but also slightly nervous—about what the coming decades will bring.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.